It is a cliché that in business time is money. However, cliché or not, in many businesses including those provided by so-called professionals and others of those who offer their services to their customers or clients at an hourly rate, and given the frenetic pace at which in many instances today's business is conducted, the truism becomes “do what you can” and “bill what you do”. It is in keeping with this maxim that the telecommunication expense management system according to the present invention is advantageous for capturing what is often lost, namely, the time and costs spent on behalf of clients or customers making cellular phone calls or otherwise communicating by SMS texting or by the sending and receiving of emails using smartphones such as made for example by Research in Motion of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada and sold under the trademark Blackberry™.
In applicant's opinion, the Blackberry™ smartphone devices epitomize the various forms of wireless handheld communication including cellular telephone, SMS, and email, which provide the business user a flexibility to use all of the user's available time during a business day to best advantage. For example, many business users commute long distances to their offices or often are working remotely from their office during the day and use either their commute time or their travel time to make and receive business calls, and also to scan their incoming text and email messages and to respond. What is however missing in the prior art of which applicant is aware, and which is an object of the present invention to provide, is an application working in cooperation with the software within the business user's smartphone so as to provide a seamless user interface which seamlessly integrates into the operation of the smartphone which allows the business user the means to capture his or her time and costs for billing purposes, as the user desires and without interfering with the operation of the smartphone, to provide just one example of the advantages of the present invention.